Text Size

Boehner: Senate first on budget

Whether it’s an overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws, renewing the Violence Against Women Act or retooling gun regulations after mass shootings across the nation, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) is perfectly fine with sitting on his hands. The House GOP’s days of incessantly repealing President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul are gone, as are their bills to eliminate obscure regulations.

Boehner is trying to shift the political pressure to Senate Democrats and President Obama after having been on the hot seat for the last two years, when House Republicans passed a slew of bills that were never acted on by the Democratic Senate or the White House. That way, Republicans, the speaker feels, won’t end up paying the political price for things that may or may not ever get done.

The sequester is a case in point. After passing bills to replace the cuts last session, Boehner has vowed that he’ll do nothing until the Senate acts to stop the massive cuts to the Pentagon and government agencies from taking effect at the start of March.

“Listen, we played our cards, we laid out our hand,” Boehner told reporters on Wednesday. “We sent legislation to the Senate and nothing happened. It’s time for the Senate to do it’s job.”

The speaker’s “Senate first” strategy allows a divided House to sit back and watch Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) struggle to wrangle votes in a chamber filled with vulnerable Democrats up for reelection in 2014. But it also carries substantial risks. If Senate Republicans join with Democrats and push through major elements of Obama’s agenda, House Republicans could become isolated if they seek to dilute or block the legislative push.

In the early months of the new session, the House has done little other than temporarily allow the debt ceiling to be raised, clear a smattering of bills to help the East Coast rebuild from Hurricane Sandy and pass a bill by Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.) that calls on Obama to state when he’ll balance the budget. And this week, the House is scheduled to take a whack at pay for federal workers. House GOP leaders are also purposefully not acting on any tax bills until they decide whether to take up tax reform.

But the big-ticket items that stand a chance of becoming law are all sitting in the Senate, a dynamic that senior GOP senators say should help usher through bipartisan deals that voters called for in the previous election.

After all, that’s how the ultimate deal on the fiscal cliff was hashed out — after it was passed in the Senate, it moved to the House and was approved by a majority of Democrats and a minority of Republicans.

Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt, a former House GOP leader who is a member of Senate Republican leadership, said it makes little sense for the House to continue pushing bills — and endure the political backlash — only to see them stall in the Senate.